The fact pattern
Read it twice before you look at the answer
A customer slips on a puddle of spilled olive oil in the aisle of GreenMart and fractures her elbow. A bottle had leaked from a shelf about 20 minutes earlier; another shopper had mentioned the spill to a stocking clerk roughly 10 minutes before the fall, but no one cleaned it or placed a warning cone. GreenMart's posted policy requires aisle inspections every 30 minutes. The customer sues GreenMart for negligence.
Try it before you scroll
Spend 15 minutes writing your own IRAC answer first — the model below is far more useful after you have committed to your own issue list. These issues are in the facts:
- Duty owed by a business to an invitee
- Breach — did GreenMart act reasonably given the known spill?
- Notice — actual vs. constructive notice of the hazard
- Causation and damages (largely uncontested here)
Model IRAC answer
One way to write it — not the only way. Compare it to yours.
Issue
Whether GreenMart breached its duty of reasonable care to a business invitee by failing to clean or warn of a spill it had been told about ten minutes before the customer fell.
Rule
A possessor of land owes business invitees a duty of reasonable care, which includes inspecting the premises for hazards and either correcting or warning of dangers the possessor knows or should know about. Liability for a transitory hazard generally requires that the defendant had actual notice of the condition, or constructive notice — that the condition existed long enough that a reasonable inspection would have revealed it.
Application
GreenMart owed the customer a duty: she entered the store during business hours to shop, making her a business invitee to whom the full duty of reasonable care runs.
The contested element is breach, and it turns on notice. There is strong evidence of actual notice: a shopper told a stocking clerk about the spill roughly ten minutes before the fall. A reasonable store, once told of a slipping hazard, would place a cone or clean the spill promptly; ten minutes of inaction after a direct report likely falls below the reasonable-person standard. Even absent actual notice, constructive notice is plausible — the spill existed for about 20 minutes, and GreenMart's own 30-minute inspection policy suggests a reasonable interval in which the hazard should have been caught, though the customer would argue the policy itself is too lax.
GreenMart could argue ten minutes was too short to respond and that its 30-minute policy was reasonable, so no breach occurred. But the better argument for the plaintiff is that actual notice changes the calculus: once an employee is told of a specific, easily-fixed hazard, the reasonable response time is minutes, not a full inspection cycle. Causation is straightforward — but for the unmarked oil, she would not have slipped — and a fractured elbow is a cognizable harm, so neither is genuinely disputed.
Conclusion
GreenMart is likely liable. Duty, causation, and damages are clear; the dispute is breach, and the ten-minute failure to act after actual notice of an easily-corrected hazard is difficult to defend as reasonable care.
Verify before you rely on this. This is an original teaching example, not legal advice. Rules vary by jurisdiction and by your professor's framing — check every rule statement against your casebook and class notes before using it.
Now try it timed.
Open the IRAC Practice Gym, set a 15-minute timer, and write your own answer to this fact pattern. You get feedback that helps you think — never an answer written for you.